The Influence of ZnO−ZrO2 Interface in Hydrogenation of CO2 to CH3OH

Abstract

AbstractThe influence of the interface in ZnO−ZrO2 catalysts for the selective hydrogenation of CO2 to CH3OH is investigated. Specifically, we perturbed its structure using two different synthetic methods: surface organometallic chemistry (SOMC) and flame‐spray pyrolysis (FSP) and investigated the speciation of the resulting materials by spectroscopic techniques, such as XAS, NMR, IR, UV‐Vis, and EPR. The results indicate that oxidic Zn particles that co‐exist with ZrO2, as synthesized by FSP, show a superior selectivity in contrast to Zn(0) nanoparticles or Zn(II) single sites on ZrO2, formed using SOMC. Further experiments underlined the importance of the ZnO−ZrO2 interface in the process: only materials with such an interface exhibit highly selective production of CH3OH, proceeding likely via the formation of the surface CH3O intermediates.